Contemporary American conservatism, which
is notorious for its internal factionalism, is held together by a
self-evident truth: conservatives' shared antipathy to liberalism.
Their main objections are well-known.

Almost to a man or woman, conservatives
oppose using government authority to enforce a vision of greater
equality labeled by its supporters, with great seduction, as
"social justice." Nearly as many conservatives object to the use of
government authority--or, alternatively, to the denial of
government authority where it is natural, legal, and
appropriate--to promote a worldview of individualism, expressivism,
and secularism. Finally, most conservatives want nothing to do with
an airy internationalism, frequently suspicious of the American
nation, that has shown itself so inconstant in its support for the
instruments of security that are necessary in the modern world.

No
shame attaches, or should, to relying in politics on the adhesive
property that comes from the sentiment of common dislike. That
sentiment is the heart that beats within the breast of the
conservative movement, supplying much of its unity. This heart
sustains four heads, known generally as religious conservatives,
economic or libertarian-minded conservatives, natural-rights or
neoconservatives, and traditionalists or paleoconservatives.

The
four heads comprise a coalition of the willing that came together
during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The remarkable diversity of
this coalition has been both a source of strength and a source of
weakness for the conservative movement. Each part came into
existence at a different time and under different circumstances,
and each has been guided by a different principle by which it
measures what is good or right.

For religious conservatives, that
principle is biblical faith.

For libertarians, it is the idea of
"spontaneous order," the postulate that a tendency is operative in
human affairs for things to work out for themselves, provided no
artificial effort is made to impose an overall order.

For neoconservatives, it is a version of
"natural right," meaning a standard of good in political affairs
that is discoverable by human reason.

Finally, for traditionalists, it is
"History" or "Culture," meaning the heritage that has come down to
us and that is our own.

There are refinements and subdivisions
that could be added to this schema, but it represents, I think, a
fairly standard approach to discussing the different intellectual
currents inside the conservative coalition. Recently, however, a
number of commentators have fallen into the practice--I use this
expression advisedly--of replacing this four-part schema by a
two-part division based on a distinction between the concepts of
"Culture" and "Creed." The new system of categorization derives
from a book published last year by Samuel Huntington, entitled Who
Are We? in which the author offers these concepts as the two basic
modes in any society for establishing national identity.1 The categories are
meant to refer to the whole nation, but conservatives have applied
them to discussions of their own movement.

My
argument this afternoon will be that introducing this new
categorization schema represents a huge error, especially as a way
of discussing conservatism. The Culture-Creed distinction does not
simplify; it distorts. Built into its categories are premises that
attempt by fiat to order and arrange the different parts of the
conservative coalition. Not only is this arrangement "partisan," in
the sense of favoring the Cultural category, but it also attempts,
with no basis either in principle or in fact, to place faith inside
of Culture, thereby suggesting a natural grouping of
traditionalists and religious conservatives in opposition to
natural-rights or neoconservatives. Whether this attempt was
undertaken consciously or not is of little matter; what counts are
its effects, and these could have serious and negative implications
for the conservative movement.

Let
me now take a step back and describe the concepts of Culture and
Creed. Huntington initially provides a social science definition of
Culture that is so broad as to be meaningless. Culture consists of
"a people's language, religious beliefs, social and political
values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and
inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavioral
patterns that reflect these subjective elements."

Huntington is less interested, however, in
social science than in recovering a basis today for patriotism and
for securing unity in America. It is our Culture that concerns him.
He labels that culture "Anglo-Protestantism," which refers to
everything that Huntington elects to emphasize among the first New
England settlers. His selection boils down to four main elements:
our language (English); our religion (dissenting Protestantism);
our basic political beliefs (a commitment to liberty,
individualism, and self-government); and our race (white).

Since Huntington wants Culture to work as
a source or standard of identity, and identity in a positive sense,
he allows it to evolve in order to perform its function. In its
evolved form, the Culture to which we should look refers--still--to
the English language and to the same commitment to liberty and
self-government; the notion of religion is broadened slightly from
dissenting Protestantism to Christianity insofar as it has been
Protestantized. Race as a criterion of distinction drops out.

As
for Creed, Huntington initially defines it in a social science
fashion as the taking of bearings from theoretical claims that are
offered in principle as universal or applicable to all. Examples of
Creed that he identifies are communism and classical liberalism.
The use of these broad-based theoretical concepts is what
Huntington means by Creedalism as distinguished from Culturalism.
As he says at one point:

People are not likely to find in political
principles [i.e., a Creed] the deep emotional content and meaning
provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and
nationality. These attachments may have little or no basis in fact,
but they do satisfy a deep human longing for meaningful
community.

Once
again, however, Huntington's interest in Who Are We? is more in our
own Creed than in Creeds in general. Our Creed consists of an idea
of nature, specifically of natural rights, as articulated in
documents like the Declaration of Independence.

How
does the binary distinction between Culture and Creed replace and
subsume the four-part division of conservatism? The implication is
the following. The category of Culture consists of traditionalists
and religious conservatives--the first for the obvious reason of
their emphasis on our history and culture and the second because
Huntington identifies dissenting Protestantism as first or
original. The category of Creed consists of natural-rights or
neoconservatives and libertarians--the former because they
regularly reference natural rights and the Declaration of
Independence and the latter because they think in terms of general
principles of economic reasoning.

An
example will help to illustrate how this binary mapping of
conservatism has entered into contemporary discussion. Lawrence
Auster, an outspoken conservative, publishes an instructive blog
entitled "View from the Right." Never one to mince words, he begins
a spirited entry of October 25, 2005, with an attack on President
George W. Bush (one of his frequent targets) in an article
ironically entitled "Under Bush and the American Creed, America
Continues Its Bold Progress":

At President Bush's annual Ramadan dinner
at the White House this week--did you know the President has an
annual Ramadan dinner?--he announced for the first time in our
nation's history we have added a Koran to the White House Library.
Yippee.2

Arguing that this recognition serves
unwisely to legitimize Islam in America, Auster finds further
evidence of this same error in a passage from a speech given the
previous week by Senator John McCain at the Al Smith Dinner:

We have a nation of many races, many
religious faiths, many points of origin, but our shared faith is
the belief in liberty, and we believe this will prove stronger,
more enduring and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few
at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or
to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than
longevity.3

In
Auster's view, the McCain-Bush position represents the perfect
expression of creedal thinking:

According to McCain, the meaning of
America is that we have no common culture and no coherent set of
traditions but give equal freedom to all cultures, traditions and
religions. Such a cultureless society is stronger and more enduring
than any other.4

Auster may have taken some liberties with
the strict claims of Bush and McCain, but his general point could
not be more clear: The end result of the Creed is at best
indifference, at worst hostility, to Culture.

This
application of the Culture-Creed distinction to the conservative
movement contains two assumptions. The first is that Creedalists
are not true conservatives, but conservatives on their way to
becoming liberals, if they are not there already. The other is that
religious conservatives--meaning those concerned with biblical
faith--fall inside the category of Culturalists. Here would seem to
be the main gambit involved in this analysis: to define those of
faith as closer to cultural traditionalists than to proponents of
natural rights.

In
light of this questionable mapping of the conservative movement, it
is fair to ask whether Creed and Culture make up helpful categories
that assist in understanding reality, or whether they force the
analyst to describe reality in a way that satisfies these
categories.

Thomas Hobbes, that puckish British
philosopher, has a chapter in Leviathan in which he reminds us that
abstract categories are human constructions, born either of men's
efforts to comprehend the world or of the aim of some to dictate
how others will think. The result very often is that these terms
are imprecise, conflating different things under the same label and
producing ever-growing confusions. Hobbes was a very timid man, and
as is not infrequent with personalities of this kind, he was also a
bit of a sadist. The trait served him well in describing how an
individual, when employing a poorly circumscribed category, will
soon find himself "entangled in words as a bird in lime twigs, the
more he struggles, the more belimed."

Have
we become "belimed" by adopting the Culture-Creed distinction?

I
bear some slight personal responsibility for popularizing this
distinction. Last year I wrote a review essay on Huntington's Who
Are We? for The Weekly Standard.5 In contrast to the avalanche of reviews from
the Left attacking the book, mine was in many ways very
appreciative. I followed the Golden Rule of discussing the work of
a major thinker, which is to treat it initially on its own terms.
Hence my lengthy discussion of the Culture-Creed distinction, on
which I offered two observations.

First, I pointed out that more than 20
years ago, Huntington wrote a previous book on America--a fact he
all but hides in this one--in which he invoked the Culture-Creed
dyad.6 In both
books he argues that forging our national identity requires relying
on both Culture and Creed. But whereas in the earlier book he
contends that America should emphasize the Creed, in the current
one he argues that it should identify more with the Culture.

Second, I asked what reason could account
for so fundamental a change. A higher ordering idea of some kind,
contained either within one of the two principles or coming from a
new one, ought to have been supplied to account for how to regulate
the appropriate mix of Culture and Creed. I offered a couple of
speculative comments of my own on this issue and suggested that it
would be a nice question for others to consider.

In
the past year, this theme has been taken up by two well-known
political scientists. In a recent issue of The Claremont Review of
Books, the editor, Charles Kesler, has a fine essay on Huntington's
work. He begins with some cogent criticisms of how Huntington
allows the concept of Creed to slide from its specific and original
American meaning (a support of natural rights) to its more general
social scientific meaning (any kind of broad type of theoretical
reasoning). The result is a category that encompasses everything
offered in the name of rational principles, from the position of
limited government and individualism of the Founders to the Big
Government position of the Progressives.

Following this clarification of the
concept of Creed, Kesler goes on to argue that we need both
concepts, but that the standard of regulation must stem from the
Creed (properly understood). He concludes his essay:

The American creed is the keystone of
American national identity; but it requires a culture to sustain
it. The republican task is to recognize the creed's primacy, the
culture's indispensability and the challenge which political wisdom
alone can answer, to shape a people that can live up to its
principles.7

Another very perceptive article appeared
this fall in Society, written by Peter Skerry. Skerry takes
Huntington to task for much of his treatment of the status of the
Hispanic community in America and for his analysis of the process
of immigrant integration into an American identity. On the major
theoretical distinction of Culture and Creed, however, Skerry
embraces Huntington's analysis and shares his Cultural emphasis.
America needs both Creed and Culture, but the senior partner today
is--and should be--Culture, which Skerry observes is "at the core
of Huntington's understanding of American national identity."8

Both
of these essays, each critical in its own way of Huntington's work,
make use of the Culture-Creed distinction. In doing so, they, along
now with many other writings, lend credibility to the view that
these categories are adequate to define the terrain of this
inquiry. It is this position that now needs to be challenged.

Before turning directly to this question,
it is worthwhile to observe that for many "Culturalists," there
appears to be as much politics as social science in the
Culture-Creed categorization scheme. No sooner is the distinction
introduced than Culturalists put it to work to argue for their
positions on two major issues of the day.

The
first is the previously mentioned matter of immigration policy.
Culturalists are deeply concerned with the current rate and
character of immigration. Huntington devotes a large portion of his
book to warning of the threat to national unity posed by the influx
of Hispanics, largely Mexican. We are in danger of establishing two
different cultures in the United States: one English-speaking and
Anglo-Protestant, the other Spanish-speaking and, I suppose, Latin
Catholic. Not only is it said that a Cultural approach makes us
more aware of this problem, but also Creedalists are charged with
being incapable of taking this problem seriously. Their reasoning
in universal terms about all human beings makes them "a-Cultural"
or anti-Cultural, which for practical purposes means, for
immigration politics, multicultural. The Culture-Creed distinction
is put to use as the proverbial stick with which to beat certain
(alleged) foes of immigration restriction.

The
other issue on which Culturalists insist today is foreign policy,
where many of them are highly critical of the Bush Administration's
position on the war on terrorism. The Administration's policy in
launching the Iraq war and in emphasizing democracy is again said
to be a consequence of Creedal thinking, which in its
universalistic perspective leads to a naïve belief, often
labeled "Wilsonianism," in the possibility of exporting Western
democracy to the rest of the world. Creedalism blinds one to the
factual primacy of Culture. If the Creedalists who have designed
the current foreign policy appreciated the strength and soundness
of Culture at home, acknowledging that every other nation or
civilization has its Culture just as we have ours, the folly of
their grandiose project of nation building would quickly become
evident to them.

Culturalists here, incidentally, have
their closest allies among those on the Left, including the
multiculturalists, who on this issue adopt the Culturalist and
realist position. Again, the Culture-Creed distinction becomes the
weapon of choice in attacking a policy even though a good number of
natural-rights conservatives have expressed reservations about this
policy of their own.

II

Huntington's inquiry is concerned with
cohesiveness and justification--with what enables Americans to be a
people, in the sense of possessing unity, and with what makes this
people good or worthy in its own eyes. Creed and Culture are said
to provide the categories that cover this terrain and allow for
intelligent investigation of these questions. But these categories,
I have argued, are neither adequate nor exhaustive. Even as
defined, they are hugely asymmetrical. Creed refers to a doctrine
or set of principles; Culture is presented as a compilation of
existing sociological facts and realities. But as should be obvious
by now, Culture is used to do far more than reference pure facts.
It is itself a doctrine that selects facts and bids us to judge the
world in a certain way.

It
seems to me that a more rewarding approach to the study of unity
would begin by separating the study of pure sociological facts--the
analysis of what is (or has been) our language, our customs,
beliefs, and the like--from all doctrines meant to supply an idea
of unity and of right. It would then be possible to examine these
doctrines without built-in presuppositions to see how they conceive
of cohesiveness and deal with certain sociological facts.

Given my time limits here, I will restrict
myself to three major doctrines that were put forth in the early
period of our history and that remain important for contemporary
politics and the modern conservative movement: natural rights,
traditionalism, and faith.

The
question of what set of ideas can create cohesiveness and
justification (or right) was naturally addressed at the time of
America's founding, when the issue of forging unity was one of the
main challenges facing political actors at the time. The first
official debate on this question took place at the Continental
Congress in 1774 and was recorded by John Adams. The issue before
Congress, to use Adams's terms, was what was to be the "foundation
of right" for the American people. Every community must have such a
foundation or first principle by which to define and justify
itself.

Adams asked his colleagues whether
Americans should continue to rely, as they had been doing until
then, on appeals to tradition in the form of "the charters" or "the
common law"--i.e., the traditional rights of Anglos--or whether
they should instead shift foundations and recur to "the law of
nature."9 Adams and
John Jay were the two most forceful advocates in this debate for
the new doctrine of the law of nature, urging that Congress embrace
natural rights as a supplement to, if not a replacement for, the
historical claims.

Americans became the first people to take
the doctrine of the law of nature from the realm of theory or
philosophy and to introduce it into political life as an active
foundation for a new polity. To proponents, such as Adams, Jay, and
Jefferson, the doctrine of natural rights could function
effectively to help make Americans one people and to justify a new
form of politics.

The
basic content of this doctrine, of which all are now well aware,
teaches that political communities can be formed to satisfy
people's legitimate desires to protect their natural rights. Yet
beyond its specific content, this position was also meant to imbue
the American people with a certain way of thinking about political
life. The doctrine rests on the premise that broad rational inquiry
into the character of politics can result in the discovery of the
principles of how a free society can be put together. This premise
encourages openness to theory and to reason.

To
be sure, this approach has been qualified in practice in hundreds
of ways. To take only the most conspicuous example, even the
documents that are most renowned for articulating and putting into
motion the law of nature--the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution--are often celebrated more in a spirit of veneration
than as an invitation to exercise reason. Nevertheless, if we take
Culturalists as the guide, the natural-rights position at the end
of the day does indeed support a posture that is friendly--too
friendly, by the Culturalists' account--to rational and theoretical
inquiry.

Some
Culturalists, as noted, assert that the natural-rights doctrine
(labeled the Creed) leads to an obliviousness or even hostility to
the sociological factors that sustain unity. While this criticism
applies to certain rationalist positions, it did not hold for the
Founders in their own understanding of natural rights. The same
person who championed the adoption of the new principle of natural
rights at the Continental Congress--John Jay--wrote the classic
essay (Federalist 2) specifying the factors that constitute Culture
and their significance in contributing to unity. He invited
statesmen to keep these considerations in mind when judging the
general interests of society. One of the nation's leading
Creedalists, Thomas Jefferson, sought to discourage rapid
immigration on the grounds that the foreigners would bring with
them "the principles of government they leave, imbibed in their
early youth" and infuse these into our legislation so as to "bias
its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent,
distracted mass...."10

The
core of the Founders' position was hardly "a-Cultural": Beyond what
was demanded for the protection of rights, there was no impediment
to promoting cultural factors. The protection of natural rights is
a floor of politics, even an absolute floor, but it is not its
ceiling.

The
further Culturalist argument--that Creedal thinking in general, as
distinct from adherence to the specific Creed of the Founders,
slides inevitably into a-Culturalism--has a response from the
Founders other than that the clear use of reason is the best
antidote to its abuse. It should be added as well that if this
Culturalist criticism is to be employed against Creedal thinking,
its analogue should be applied to Cultural thinking as well. What
is good for the goose is good for the gander. Culturalism must be
viewed not only in its benign form of "Anglo-Protestantism," but
also in its more virulent forms known for excesses of their
own.

A
second doctrine of cohesiveness and right is "traditionalism."
Parts of what are involved in this position were signaled in two of
the objections that were raised in the 1770s to invoking the law of
nature.

One
argument was that recurring to general principles about nature,
whatever their theoretical merit, would simply not work; they
lacked sufficient binding force to hold society together. A society
is not the same thing as a group of philosophers. People need
something that appeals to the heart more than to the head. An
historical narrative and shared sentiments, not abstract
principles, are the substances that form cohesiveness.

The
second objection, in some way contradictory, conceded that
theoretical doctrines were indeed capable of mobilizing people and
holding them together (at least temporarily), but they would do so
in a way that would prove dangerous and destabilizing. Once society
is open to reason, doctrine will succeed doctrine, unsettling
authority and tending inevitably to ever more radical positions.
Appeals to settled historical facts and existing commonalities were
a safer way to proceed.

These two objections represented only a
prelude, however, to the full doctrine of traditionalism, which was
introduced in America in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
Both Charles Kesler and Peter Skerry rightly identify Samuel
Huntington's "Culturalist" position as the epitome of a
traditionalist or "Burkean" approach. The mention of Edmund Burke,
the great 18th century British thinker and statesman, should make
clear that traditionalism did not spring forth on its own as the
mere representation of existing sociological facts. It would hardly
have required a thinker of the caliber of Burke to "discover" what
was already known to all. Rather, traditionalism is itself a
theoretical doctrine designed to cultivate a disposition toward the
facts. For rhetorical reasons, its proponents choose to present it
as anti-theoretical or purely descriptive, but this is pure
stratagem.

Edmund Burke was a close student of
Montesquieu, who was the first to spell out the general premises of
the traditionalist doctrine. (Like almost everything else with this
complex thinker, it is best to consider his promotion of this
doctrine as a part of a larger scheme, with conflicting and
countervailing elements.) Its original form is less familiar to us
because it applied to conditions before the French Revolution, but
the underlying elements and aims are the same in both cases.

The
specific problem on which Montesquieu focused was absolutism--i.e.,
absolutist or unchecked monarchy. Absolutist monarchy to him was
the very opposite of the old or traditional form of monarchy, which
was characterized by checks and limitations. Absolutism was widely
supported by philosophers and theorists, among them many who spoke
of nature and of natural rights. Especially those theorists who
thought in abstractions encouraged "enlightened despotism" or
"legal despotism" as the way to make society conform to their
principles of reason. For Montesquieu, then, modern rationalist
thinking posed a grave threat to free government and to
liberty.

Montesquieu accordingly proposed an
alternative: "tradition," actually a tradition, since an appeal to
tradition in the abstract is without meaning. The tradition he
discovered was rooted in what he called the "Gothic constitution."
The germ of this constitution could be traced to the German
barbarians. It was among these people, who knew nothing of theory
or philosophy (or Christianity), that modern liberty was born. The
first governments of the German tribes were republican systems,
although later, after their conquest of much of Europe and the need
to form larger units, modifications grew up that produced the
limited, traditional monarchies. Montesquieu labeled these systems,
which still reflected the basic spirit of barbarian rule, as the
"best form of government that men can imagine." From this analysis
came the famous theme, repeated by so many others, that the origins
of modern liberty lay "in the forests of Germany."11

The
doctrine of traditionalism had three advantages.

First, it based everything on something
that was old and, for all intents and purposes, original. In so
doing, it appealed to the historical rather than the theoretical,
and therefore to what many thought spoke to people's hearts or
sentiments. The appeal to the old also accorded with a deeply
ingrained human tendency to identify what is our own and ancestral
with the good.

Second, the ancestral in this case was
good. It was the fetus of the hardy spirit that supported
independence and liberty. Liberty was the constant theme stressed
by all who spoke of the "Gothic constitution," in whatever specific
form they had in mind.

Third, traditionalism favored a certain
set of mental habits. If the source of liberty did not inhere in
philosophy or rational thought, then where did it come from? The
short answer was that it was just there--in the mores (or culture)
of the barbarians, passed down to their successors and to those
whom they influenced. The longer answer is that liberty is the gift
of a pure historical accident and is our good fortune. It is
therefore not universal or perhaps transferable. Man did not make
free government by his own wits; it was not a human construction.
Traditionalist thinkers discovered "tradition" or "culture" for a
very specific purpose: to provide an alternative to rationalist
thinking.

Burke adapted this basic idea to a
different context, when the immediate threat to liberty came not
from absolutist monarchy, but from radical democracy and the
natural-rights doctrines in France. The main point was still that
abstract or metaphysical thinking in politics leads inevitably to
excess and absolutism. History or "prescription"--one might call it
evolving Culture--was the basis of the alternative to abstract
principle. Burke appealed to Britain's old and Gothic constitution,
although he gave it more of an English color to make it Britain's
"own."

It
was in this Burkean form that traditionalist doctrine was brought
into the United States beginning in the 1790s, where it had to be
amended to fit the republican conditions here. In the full American
argument, it was the pure republican spirit of the Goths that was
passed from the Germans to the Anglo-Saxons and then to the Puritan
settlers, who one writer aptly called the "The Goths of New
England." An abbreviated version was simply to dispense with the
Goths and start with our first settlers or Puritans.
"Anglo-Protestantism" is but the latest iteration in this old and
venerable formula of defining "who we are" by an account of who we
were.

The
American case has been a special one for traditionalism. In
contrast to the examples of the application of reason to politics
in Europe, the American case, in the form of the doctrine of
natural rights, represented the one instance that was favorable to
liberty. Furthermore, the facts of our history include a Revolution
that was made in part by those who insisted on natural rights and a
Constitution produced by Founders who exercised "reflection and
choice." All of this has made it difficult to reject reason
completely, as is the case in some Continental forms of
traditionalism, and to rely entirely on accident.

Burke, a prudent man, would almost
certainly never have been a full-blown Culturalist in America. Most
Culturalists are not either, but call for a combination of
tradition and reason, or Culture and Creed. Look just beneath the
surface, however, and all of the elements of the noble doctrine of
traditionalism remain. Culture is "at the core of their
understanding of American national identity."

III

The
doctrines of natural rights and traditionalism are not exhaustive.
I would like to note a third and very different kind of doctrine,
which relies on faith. Efforts to subsume it under Culture or
tradition have a superficial appeal. If Culture is conceived as
referring to all that is not Creed, then of course faith is by
definition Cultural. Furthermore, in America, not only is
Protestantism very old, but, at least in the case of New England,
faith was the reason why the settlers first came to these
shores.

Furthermore, there is an understanding of
religion, which fits in large measure the traditionalist argument.
Burke's defense of the status of the Church of England within the
British constitution, and current sociological descriptions of the
numbers of Christians in America, are all consistent with vague
appeals to religion being a familiar element of kith and kin and of
"who we are." But when one examines the cases of those who are
moved by faith, whether the Puritans long ago or those who are
organizing today in politics on the basis of faith, it becomes
evident how different is this doctrine from that of traditionalism.
The movement of faith does not justify itself because it is old or
first or ancestral, but because it is a living idea. Faith does not
begin by extolling accident, nor is its main purpose to curb the
use of rationalism in politics.

The
"doctrine" of faith, in brief, does not fit into the category of
traditionalism (or Culture) any more than fits into the category of
natural right (or Creed). It is its own category. If proof of
separateness of faith from tradition were needed, one has only to
consider where those of faith stand on certain of the issues of
today.

Those on the religious right must make
prudent judgments on practical issues, but they certainly do not,
for example, weigh the problem of immigration under the same
calculus as traditionalists. Maintaining the English language is
important, but so too is increasing the number of those who are apt
to end up as practicing members of religious communities. Being one
in faith is a culture of its own. As for the war on terrorism and
the prudence of attempting to spread democracy, it is by no means
clear what faith, if anything, has to say, but it is certainly not
aligned in principle, like traditionalism, against a policy that
may consider universalistic assumptions about human nature.

Faith today is an active force that has
its own project. It is a project different in kind from the other
doctrines insofar as it is not concerned in the first instance with
politics, but with another realm altogether: our relation to the
transcendent. It is therefore not surprising that many who took
their bearings from faith were for much of the last century
apolitical, or at any rate they never thought it correct to
organize collectively on the basis of a concern emanating from
faith.

Involvement in politics on grounds
relating to faith was therefore sporadic and arose on specific
issues. But about 30 years ago or so, in response to an assessment
of a new situation characterized by a growing political and
cultural threat to faith, a conviction grew that the two
realms--the political-cultural and the religious--intersect, not
just sporadically on particular issues, but on an ongoing basis and
systematically. Not all, but some, of faith concluded that there
was a need to organize and engage more directly in collective
action in political and cultural affairs. This decision was the
basis of what became known by the 1980s as the religious right.

Faith as a doctrine in the political realm
does not aim to supply a complete standard of political right. It
supports a second-order political-cultural project related to the
interests or concerns of faith. Stated defensively, that project
includes action designed to create and protect havens conducive to
fostering a life committed to faith. In practice, this has meant
undertaking efforts to counterbalance forces working in politics
and culture that are indifferent or hostile to faith.

But
the project is misunderstood if only its defensive aspect is
considered. There is a positive element as well. Recall here the
older idea, one originally of Puritan roots, of America's role as
an instrument in the service of the transcendent. As one minister,
speaking at almost the same time as the issuance of the Declaration
of Independence, reminded Americans:

The providences of God in first planting
his church in this, then howling wilderness, and in delivering and
preserving it to this day...are reckoned among the most glorious
events that are to be found in history, in these later ages of the
world. And there are yet more glorious events in the womb of
providence.12

With
the waning of biblical faith in so many other Western nations, the
idea that America might serve to keep the lamp of faith burning
until the tide perhaps turns elsewhere has a renewed urgency to
many of the religious.

For
those of faith, the adoption of the legal Constitution in no way
abrogated this understanding. America was assigned a special place
in serving a higher cause. There was a second and unwritten
constitution meant to operate alongside the legal one. Because
these two constitutions deal with largely distinct matters, there
was no need to combine them into a single document--indeed, it
would be harmful to the purposes of both realms ever to attempt to
do so. The two constitutions were meant to exist together in the
hearts and thoughts of many Americans and to be complementary in
practice. For those of this view, America is not fully America--and
cannot be fully loved and cherished--if this unwritten constitution
is renounced and if faith is left to survive here, at best, as
merely one belief among many.

One
of the major activities occurring within the religious right today
is the reformulation of this project in a form that speaks to our
times. Conditions have changed, and the specific character of the
positive project must change as well. Once conceived as a mission
of the "reformed" church only, in opposition to Rome and Judaism,
it is today being reconceived--I am not speaking of the fine points
of theology--as a common enterprise among those devoted to biblical
faith to cope with a culture that increasingly considers itself as
"post-religious." There is no illusion on the part of most of those
of faith that this political-cultural agenda will bring complete
unity or cohesiveness, but it seeks an America in which the element
of faith would have a central place.

Faith faces new challenges inside the
contemporary world. Whether it will find its ally more often with
those who support natural rights or those who support tradition is
the central issue that will shape the character of conservatism,
and thereby the character of our politics, in the period to come.
The decisions on the arrangement of the conservative movement have
not been made. It is a matter far too consequential to be made
subject to influence by the hazards or contrivances of a scholarly
distinction pursuing what looks to be its own agenda.

James W. Ceaser, Ph.D., is Professor of
Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of several
books on American politics and political thought, including
Presidential Selection, Reforming the Reforms, Liberal Democracy
and Political Science, and Reconstructing America.

1.Samuel Huntington, Who
Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2004).

2.Lawrence Auster, "View
from the Right," October 25, 2005, at
http://amnation.com/vfr/.

3.Ibid. The full speech
can be accessed at
http://mccain.senate.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=Newscenter.ViewSpeech&Content
_id=1617.

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The Culture-Creed distinction that some commentators apply to theconservative movement favors the Cultural category and attempts,with no basis in principle or fact, to place faith inside ofCulture, suggesting a natural grouping of traditionalists andreligious conservatives in opposition to natural-rights orneoconservatives. Its effects could have serious and negativeimplications for the conservative movement.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) says it's "a great way to start the day for any conservative who wants to get America back on track."

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